Jung’s Complicated Relationship to Monogamy

In this episode, I explore Jung’s complicated relationship to monogamy, sexuality, and love. Jung’s own life with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff seems to resemble what we might now call a vee relationship, similar in some ways to the painful arrangement between theologian Karl Barth, his wife Nelly Barth, and Charlotte von Kirschbaum.

I also bring in Otto Gross and the provocative idea that conventional monogamy might suffocate the soul — even the troubling claim that a mistress could be necessary for psychic vitality. Rather than romanticizing this, I try to sit with the tension: Jung saw sexuality as something that could become hallowed when expressed through love, but his own life also shows how easily depth, eros, and spiritual language can be used to justify real human harm.

This is not an episode offering easy moral conclusions. It is an attempt to think with Jung without worshiping him, to take eros seriously without excusing betrayal, and to ask whether love, once named as sacred, still has to answer to the wounds it leaves behind.